ANTHROPOS
113.2018: 21 – 38
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
Warren Shapiro
Abstract. – Fifteen complaints are lodged against the so-called
“new kinship studies” inspired by David Schneider. The main
argument of these studies, that they get at indigenous apprecia-
tions, as contrasted with pre-Schneiderian analyses, supposedly
entrapped in a Eurocentric model, is shown to be without merit.
On the contrary, these latter analyses, far from assuming a pro-
creative base for kinship worldwide, regularly discovered it in
the field. Schneiderian kinship studies are shown to be grossly
deficient from a scholarly standpoint, and to aspire to hegemony
in the academy. [kinship, history of anthropology, the culture of
academia, scholarly responsibility, “radical” feminism]
Warren Shapiro, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Rut-
gers University. – He has carried out fieldwork among the Ab-
original people of northeast and central Arnhem Land, Austra-
lia. – He has been writing on kinship and other subjects for over
four decades. Among his publications are “Social Organization
in Aboriginal Australia” (Canberra 1979) and “Denying Biolo-
gy. Essays on Gender and Pseudo-Procreation” (co-edited with
Uli Linke, Lanham 1996), and dozens of other articles. See also
References Cited.
[A]ll systems of social relationships recognized by
anthropologists cross-culturally as kin relationships
are rooted in parturition (Goodenough 2001: ​217).
[I]n many primitive tribes the terms used for the
immediate members of the family are either distin-
guished from the same terms in the extended sense
by the addition of some particle, or terms corre-
sponding to “own” are used … Family is family,
whatever the system of relationship … (Golden-
weiser 1937: ​301).
Although the studies which suggest that kinship
in many cultures is defined not only by genealogy
but also by a code of conduct, particularly con-
duct expressing sharing of food, land and services,
may seem to challenge the anthropological con-
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ceptualisation of kinship as a system of ties estab-
lished through procreation, they are, in fact, para-
sitic upon it (Holy 1996: ​167).
[T]he idea of Western bio-essentialized folk con-
cepts of kinship being endlessly ethnocentrically
project onto non-Western cultures by ethnogra-
phers and kinship theorists is itself a kind of an-
thropological myth (Wilson 2016: ​573).
Creativity is predicated on a system of rules and
forms, in part determined by intrinsic human ca-
pacities. Without such constraints, we have arbi-
trary and random behavior, not creative acts. …
[I]t would be an error to think of human freedom
solely in terms of absence and constraint (Chom-
sky 1975: ​133).
The self-styled “new kinship studies” are expressly
indebted to David Schneider’s writings – particular-
ly his study of American kinship (1968), his Mor-
gan Centennial essay (1972), and most of all his
“Critique” (1984) of previous kinship scholarship.
Although particular analyses do not all share the de-
ficiencies enumerated below, this common indebt-
edness, it seems to be, is sufficient to regard these
studies as constituting a “school of thought.” This
appellation is quite deliberate: I shall argue that this
“scholastic” character has a stark Medieval quali-
ty, specifically, that it ignores (or is ignorant of) an
enormous quantity of pertinent evidence; that it also
ignores elementary logical and semantic operations;
that it denigrates its scholarly opponents as “Euro-
centric,” at the same time claiming, utterly errone-
ously; that it presents “the natives’ point of view”
(Geertz 1983: ​55); that it substitutes for empirical-
ly and logically sound analysis a Manichean model
22 Warren Shapiro

of humanity which is remarkably compatible with informants. Consider Carsten’s own analysis of her
Biblical eschatology, including a messianic view of Malay materials in the light of those of other schol-
Schneider and a hopelessly obsolete biology/culture ars. She claims that the Malay village she studied
dichotomy; that it substitutes for the alleged author- has “undivided kinship” (1995: ​115), but she pro-
ity of a scientific establishment a very real authori- vides little data on kin classification. She does tell
tarian plan of its own; that it violates principles of us, however, that “villagers perceive a continuum of
scholarly debate, either by ignoring its opponents or relatedness, from the ‘close’ … to the ‘distant’ …”
by responding ad hominem. (1990: ​272). Other sources concur with this latter
For present purposes I  shall mostly ignore finding, indicating, in fact, that Malay kinship is de-
Schneider’s scholarship itself: I intend to deal with cidedly “divided.” Superficially, the kinship termi-
this at length in a future project.1 I shall focus in- nology conforms to the generational pattern of Mur-
stead on his by now considerable legion of admirers, dock (1949) and others. But Banks makes the key
who present themselves as advocates of a performa­ point that “Malayan [kin] terms tend to be appended
tive view of human kinship, where kin (or kinship- by … marker-affixes indicating that the individual
like) ties are formed by non-procreative criteria, in question is ‘like a …’ 5 but not a definitive repre-
such as commensality (Carsten 1995), name-shar- sentative of the Malayan category” (1974: ​47; em-
ing (Nuttall 1994), and consociation (Weston 1991). phasis added). Thus, for example, only one’s geni-
Although I have dealt with particular flaws of the tor is referred to by the lexically unmarked “father”
performativist view elsewhere,2 the present analy- term; other “fathers” are lexically marked accord-
sis is intended to be more comprehensive. I pre­sent ing to their degree of collaterality. Thus, one’s FB
it as a series of complaints, to wit: is, in Malay parlance, “father one degree removed,”
father’s male first cousin, “father two degrees re-
(1)  “There is minimal and/or sophomoric attention moved,” etc. Malays, Banks (1974: ​51) concludes,
given to kinship terminologies.” Despite the seem- “thus distinguish degrees of cousinship in their own
ingly endless celebrations of a “return” to kinship generation much as American English informants
studies inspired by Schneider, what has decidedly do,” except that “the concept of collateral distance
not returned is the study of kinship terminologies, … is applied … in all generations and not simply
the foundational subject of the entire discipline in the in [one’s] own.” Moreover, actual parents and chil-
United States (Shapiro 2012: ​394), thanks to Lewis dren are said to be the “real” members of their re-
Henry Morgan’s herculean labors (Morgan 1871), spective kin classes (Banks 1983: ​59). This is a re-
and an important part of anthropology abroad.3 This current finding in systems of kin classification, as
is much less true of scholars influenced by Schnei- Goldenweiser (see my second epigraph) pointed out
der early on.4 But subsequent studies of performed many years ago, and, as such, it largely demolishes
kinship give the analyses of systems of kin classi- the claims of the performativists.
fication short shrift. Weston (1991: ​xiv) dismisses To continue: Full siblings are similarly said to be
such studies as “arcane.” Similarly, Carsten (2004: ​ the “real” members of their kin classes but half-sib-
16) voices what I take to be a generally held view lings are lexically marked – i.e., even at this close a
among advocates of a performative approach when genealogical position secondary semantic status is
she writes that “studies of kin classification became in effect. Wilder (1982: ​86) notes Malay expressions
a highly technical and specialized area, quite di- which he translates as “mother’s side” and “father’s
vorced from the … everyday experience of kinship.” side” and which are employed in kin classifica-
In other words, kinship terminologies are not tion. Banks (1974: ​51; 1983: ​57, 60) and McKin-
what one might call, following Geertz (1983: ​57 f.), ley (1983: ​345) provide examples of kin reckoning,
“experience near.” But they come much closer if one all of which involve parent/child and sibling/sibling
considers certain details readily elicited from our links, both genealogical and terminological. Read
(2018) has called attention to the cross-cultural oc-
currence of the latter, exemplified in English by the
  1 I  shall mention Marshall Sahlins’ recent contribution to a
general theory of kinship (Sahlins 2013) only occasionally.
rule, “I call the wife of anyone I call ‘uncle’ ‘aunt’.”
For a more comprehensive critique of his book, see Shapiro Note that such rules manifest native principles of
(2018). kin class extension.6
  2 See Shapiro (2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011b, 2012, 2013,
2014, 2015a, 2015b, n. d.).
  3 E.g. Kohler (1975 [1897]), Lubbock (1872), Starcke (2012   5 Throughout this essay, I use single quotes to indicate glosses,
[1889]). i.e., exact or approximate translations of foreign terms.
  4 E.g. Basso (1973), Inden and Nicholas (1977), Silverman   6 Such rules are unlike those associated especially with Har-
(1971). old Scheffler, which rely partly on genealogical positions that

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Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
Banks (1983: ​80, note 2) reports an expression
used “to refer to a group of all one’s blood kins-
men.” Wilder (1982: ​97) notes another, which he
translates as “near kin” and which, he notes else-
where (1991: ​132), distinguishes such people from
“kinsmen a little distant” and “distant kinsmen.”
Those outside this sphere are likely to be labeled by
a term which Djamour (1959: ​24), Massard (1991: ​
141), and McKinley (1983: ​336) translate as “unre-
lated” or “stranger.” Massard (1991: ​141) notes an
expression pertaining to a whole village: she trans-
lates it as “the people here are all relatives.” But in
the same paragraph she provides an expression by
which neighbors who are not kin are rendered as
“like brothers and sisters” (emphasis added).
Carsten makes much of the hearth used in com-
mon by the women of a household, but this Com-
munitarianism is decidedly limited. Thus, in a po-
lygynous marriage, according to Djamour (1959: ​
30), “[t]he children of the newer wife refer to the
father’s older wife as … [‘]stepmother[’], whereas
those of the older wife refer to their father’s new-
er wife as … [‘]young mother[’]. The wives them-
selves refer to each other’s children by their com-
mon husband as … [‘]stepchildren[’] …” There is
a great deal more in Carsten’s corpus that contra-
dicts her claim of “undivided kinship” among Ma-
lays: I shall have a bit more to say on this later. The
interested reader should see Shapiro (2011b) for a
fuller analysis.
Similarly, writing on the Reite of the Rai Coast of
Papua New Guinea, and in a volume whose purpose
is to “deconstruct” the idea of genealogy, James
Leach (2009: ​188) insists that “[t]o draw a line from
father to son (in a kinship diagram) and say that this
is a kinship connection is meaningless in Reite, for
the role of the father is not to pass on some com-
ponent of substance to the son … but – through his
work – to establish the conditions for the latter’s
growth on the land.” But in his book-length state-
ment on these matters, Leach tells us that such co-
operative labor is “modelled on procreation” (Leach
2003: ​29, emphasis added). Moreover, he renders
the kinship terminology via conventional genealog-
ical diagrams (2003: ​57 ff.), though he presents no
are likely foreign to native understandings. Schneider (1989)
dismissed them as “virtuoso manipulations.” But there is
more to the extensionist position than this: see esp. Scheffler
(1972) for a response to such criticism. Throughout this essay
my employment of such terms as “focal” and “focality” fol-
lows native distinctions – as indeed Scheffler did. Lounsbury,
by contrast, simply assumed the logical priority of close pro-
creative kin: thus his well-known analysis of Trobriand kin
classification (Lounsbury 1965) takes no account of native
distinctions noted by Malinowski and others (Shapiro n. d.).
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23
information on lexical marking or other forms of
subclassification, such as we have seen in the Ma-
lay case. But he calls attention to the teknonymous
practice whereby “[s]iblings start to call their mar-
ried female siblings ‘mother of,’ rather than ‘sibling’
… after they have borne their first child  ” (2003: ​66,
emphasis added). It is hard to see this as anything
but a practice based on procreative kinship. More-
over, this particular use of the “mother” term sug-
gests that its primary meaning is based on actual
maternity, rather than its “classificatory” counter-
part – something which is true of all other teknony-
mous usages with which I am familiar.7
A third example is a recent analysis of Lako-
ta Sioux kinship, wherein the author initially as-
serts, that “Sioux people continue to make relatives
throughout their lives who are classed with, and not
differentiated from, those they had at birth” (DeMal-
lie 1994: ​133; emphasis added). Then, two pages
later, he mentions “linguistic forms that differen­
tiated between one’s biological parents and other
mothers and fathers ” (135; emphasis added). But
he provides nothing resembling a detailed seman-
tic analysis of Lakota kinship terminology. Earlier
scholars, however, were more thorough, presenting
data that confirmed the latter statement but not the
former. Thus, Walker (1914: ​104) noted that one’s
actual parents and siblings are distinguished from
others in their respective kin classes by a modifi-
er which he renders as “own,” which is logically
comparable to Malay “real.” By contrast, these oth-
ers are said to be members of their respective kin
classes in a secondary sense: they are “considered
as” mothers, fathers, etc. (Walker 1914: ​96 f.). Close
procreative kin are said to be “of blood,” but others
are only “considered of blood” (97). A study of the
neighboring Teton Lakota by Hassrick (1944) re-
veals native rules of kin class extension, e.g., let any
woman married to a man I call “father” be called
“mother.” Such rules, as we shall see, are common
ethnographically.
(2)  “Comparable pertinent data on systems of kin
classification, which, if considered, would have ob-
viated the performativist position, have been in the
ethnographic record literally since Morgan’s day.
But pace supra, performativist scholars seem to be
unaware of it.” Thus Morgan noted that, among the
Cree of the eastern Canadian Subarctic, the term
for FB is not the “father” term in its unmarked form
but rather that term with a lexical marker. Morgan
translated this marker as “step-” and, consequently,
  7 E.g., Firth (1936: ​130), Geertz and Geertz (1975: ​85–94),
Kroeber (1917: ​70).
24
rendered the pertinent native term as “stepfather”
(Morgan 1871: ​208). In other words, in Cree the fa-
ther is what semanticists call the focal or seman-
tically central member of a larger “father” class,
while the FB is a secondary member of that class.
A less technical but perhaps more comprehensible
way of putting it is to say that the FB is fatherish, or
like a father, while the father is the Real McCoy. But
Morgan was entirely unaware that such evidence, of
which the Cree provide only one of his examples in
“Systems,” utterly undermines his communitarian
scheme of the progression of family forms more ful-
ly spelled out in “Ancient Society” (Morgan 1877).
For these examples suggest a singling out of one’s
father, mother, siblings, and children  – in other
words, one’s nuclear family – from other members
of their respective kin classes. As we saw in the Ma-
lay case, English does the same – only more obvi-
ously, i.e., without resorting to lexical marking.
Speck (1918), basing his analysis on longer field-
work and covering both the Cree and neighboring
populations, confirmed the “stepfather” finding and
added that the reciprocal terms for a man’s broth-
er’s son and brother’s daughter are themselves lexi-
cally marked versions of the “son” and “daughter”
terms, respectively. In his words they are “terms
derived from those for son and daughter” (151).
These are all terms of reference. As for “terms in-
volving address within the immediate family,” these
are “shortened forms of the non-vocatives denoting
endearment” (153), comparable to English “mom-
my” and “daddy.” Moreover, in some of these pop-
ulations the “mother” term is derived from terms
meaning “to suckle” and “breast” (153; compare
English “mama” and “mammary”), and, more di-
rectly related to procreation, it means literally “the
one who bore me” (156, note 3). The correspond-
ing “father” term is translatable as “my generator”
(156, note 1).8 Finally, in some of the groups ad-
joining the Cree, the “cousin” terms are lexical-
ly marked versions of the “sibling” terms, and the
marker means “not by blood descent” (157, note 4;
emphasis added). Again, as in the Malay case, lo-
cal notions of kinship are not so very different from
what we find in English.
A further example pertains to some of the Native
American peoples of the southern Great Plains and
to adjoining populations of the Great Basin. ­Hoebel
(1939: ​447 f.) notes that one’s parents’ same-sex
siblings are subclassed relative to the linking par­
ent, as “big” or “small” versions of the latter, de-
  8 Westermarck (1894: ​88 f.), writing on other populations, was
apparently the first to note the common use of procreative no-
tions in the construction of kin terms.
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Warren Shapiro
pending on relative age. This is to say that parent
enjoys focal status in his/her class, other members
being defined relative to him or her. This is a com-
mon feature in so-called “classificatory” terminolo-
gies: Wake (1889: ​476–479), drawing on Morgan’s
tabulations in “Systems,” noted it for Tamil-speak-
ers in South India just after Morgan’s passing, and
similar reports have come to us since.9 Moreover, in
Hoebel’s words, “The br[other] category receives
several striking extensions” (1939: ​448). “A wife-
absconder and the aggrieved husband,” he tells us,
“call each other ‘brother,’ though until a legal set-
tlement has been made … they are dangerous ene-
mies.” “This terminological practice seems to stem
from the notion that the males who share a married
woman sexually should be brothers …” (448; em-
phasis added). Hence the native extension rule, “Let
any man cavorting with my wife be terminological-
ly equated with my brother.” Moreover, “[t]he insti-
tution of formal friendship among men also entails
the use of the brother terminology. The friend …
takes the status of his ‘brother’ in the relationship
system of his comrade’s family …” (448). Hence a
further native extension rule, “Let my formal friend
be terminologically equated with my brother.”
Speck’s findings on the Cree and their neighbors
and Hoebel’s on the South Plains/Great Basin were
by no means unusual for their time.10 Indeed, they
have continued to be reported, including in many of
the classic ethnographic cases (Shapiro 2018).
(3)  “Ideologies of substance-sharing, which, if con-
sidered, would have also obviated the performativist
position, have been in the ethnographic record since
Tylor’s day. Again, it goes almost unrecognized in
the new kinship literature.” Although not nearly so
abundantly analyzed as kinship terminologies, they
point in the same direction. Over a hundred and fif-
ty years ago Tylor (1865: ​300–313) brought to the
attention of social theory “the couvade,” a practice
exemplified especially in Aboriginal Latin America
in which a child is held, Tylor emphasized, to be in a
post-partum bond of substance with its father. Sub-
sequent research, especially in Amazonia but else-
where as well,11 has shown that the mother shares
this tie too. Doja puts it cogently:
Most ethnographic accounts of couvade insist that both
parents are protecting the infant’s vigor and assisting its
fast growth through fasting [and other observances]. But
  9 E.g., Beck (1972: ​216), Nayacakalou (1955: ​48), Strathern
(1980).
10 See, e.g., Freire-Marreco (1914), Harrington (1912), Junod
(1912: ​222–226), Kroeber (1917), Walker (1914).
11 E.g., DaMatta (1973: ​279 f.), Doja (2005), Valentine (2002).
Anthropos  113.2018
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
it is important to stress that violations of the taboo not
only harm the child but can also turn against the father or
mother. … Both father’s and mother’s fasting and inac-
tivity strongly identify them with the newborn with whom
they form a community of substance (2005: ​930; empha-
sis added).
Doja (2005: ​931) further points out that some-
times a wider sphere of kin is emphasized. But this
is not true in all cases, and when it is, the injunctions
to more distant kin are attenuated, on the grounds
that they are held to share less substance with the
child (see esp. Aijmer 1992: ​8 and associated ref-
erences). These points are entirely lost on Becker-
man and Valentine (2002: ​3), in their grand claim
that Amazonian “partible paternity” – the idea that
several acts of intercourse are deemed necessary to
create a child, whose mother may have extra-mari-
tal lovers – challenges the “One Sperm, One Fertil-
ization Doctrine” espoused by “Western” science,
itself dependent on “our common Western view of
[single] paternity as universal.” As we shall see,
such charges of ethnocentrism and the parochial-
ism of science are common in the new kinship stud-
ies. The thing to note now is that Beckerman and
Valentine utterly misrepresent what we know about
Amazonian social theory, including the couvade. As
I have shown (Shapiro 2009b: ​41 f.), throughout the
area primary couvade linkages to the child pertain
to the mother and her husband, who enjoys the most
sexual access to his wife and is, therefore, most like-
ly to be the actual father of her child; her extra-mar-
ital lovers are deemed to be much less closely tied to
the child. As one Amazonian ethnographer puts it,
“the most direct bodily connections are those rein-
forced on a daily basis among parents and children
who sleep and eat together” (Conklin 2001: 118).
Carsten’s Malay analysis is relevant here as well.
Her claim is that, in the village she studied, “ideas
surrounding co-eating and sharing are as funda-
mental … as are ideas about procreation” (1991: ​
425). This allegation rests on the idea that, just as
blood is generated by procreation, so too is it held to
come about through wet-nursing and commensality,
because food is said to be transformed into blood
within the body. This way of putting it suggests that
the latter two sources of blood are modelled on the
first – a conclusion consistent with Carsten’s own
statement that
[J]ust as relatedness [i.e., kinship] is thought of in terms
of a continuum – one is more or less distantly related …
we find a parallel in terms of substance. … Mothers and
their offspring and full siblings are most closely related.
… More distant than full siblings but still close enough
for marriage to be incestuous are those, such as foster sib-
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25
lings, who have drunk the same milk. [Others] brought up
in one house who have shared meals … could technically
marry. In fact they are very unlikely to, because to do so
would carry connotations of incest (1992: ​38).
And elsewhere Carsten (1990: ​271) tells us that
“[s]hared consumption is epitomized above all
by siblings …” The obvious conclusion, surely, is
that the “fundamental” means of generating kin-
ties among Malays is indeed procreation.12 This is
also the case if we move from the begging of life to
its end. Thus, among the Kayapó of central Brazil,
“those mourning the death of a member of their im-
mediate family (for example, a spouse, sibling, or
child) have their hair cut short” (Turner 1980: ​117).
This is apparently because
[p]arents are thought to be connected to their children,
and siblings to one another, by a tie that goes deeper than
a mere social or emotional bond. The tie is imagined as
a sort of spiritual continuation of the common physical
substance that they share though conception … Although
spouses lack the intrinsic biological link of blood rela-
tions, their sexual relationship constitutes a libidinal com-
munity that is its counterpart. In as much as both sorts of
biological relationship are cut off by death, cutting off the
hair, conceived as an extension of the biological … self,
is the symbolically appropriate response to the death of a
spouse as well as a child (Turner 1980: ​117).
(4)  “Local notions of spiritual animation have been
misinterpreted by performativists.” Thus, Sahlins
(2013: ​4 f.), drawing on Godelier (2011: ​229–280),
writes of a “third party” in ideologies of concep-
tion – i.e., a spiritual one in addition to the moth-
er and father. In this connection, it is surely no ac-
cident that a group of scholars intent on divorcing
kinship from biology (see below) should seize upon
some of the well-known claims of an alleged “igno-
rance of physiological paternity,” as Sahlins (1976: ​
37–39), Carsten (2000: ​8), and Franklin (1997: ​
33–43) have all done. But none of these claims
has withstood further analysis. Thus, Malinowski
(1916: ​407) initially claimed that in the Trobriands
“the state of knowledge … is just at the point where
there is a vague idea as to some nexus between
sexual connection and pregnancy, whereas there
is no idea whatever concerning the man’s contri-
bution towards the new life which is being formed
in the mother’s body.” Conception is held to occur,
12 In her initial publications, Carsten was nearly silent on the
role Malay fathers are held to play in procreation, but others
have had more to say on the matter (see Shapiro 2011b: ​144).
Indeed, Laderman (1987: ​75) tells us that the fetus is said
to originate in the father’s brain. Carsten (2004: ​129) seems
more recently to echo this.
26
he tells us, when a spirit-child enters a woman, her
husband only “opening the way” through repeated
copulations (412 f.). But even in this classic arti-
cle Malinowski unwittingly presents contrary evi-
dence. Thus he describes a ritual bath undergone by
a woman “four of five months after the first symp-
toms of pregnancy” (404). The ceremony, he tells
us, “is connected with the incarnation of the spir-
it children” (405), and he further notes that “[t]he
view taken by one of my informants was that dur-
ing the first stage of pregnancy the … [spirit-child]
has not really entered the woman’s body. … Then,
during the ceremonial bathing, the spirit child en-
ters the body of the woman” (405). In “The Sexual
Life of Savages” these data are repeated (Malinow-
ski 1929: ​225), but we also learn that “[p]regnancy
is first diagnosed by the swelling of the breasts and
the darkening of the nipples. At this time a wom-
an may dream that the spirit of one of her kinsmen
brings her the child from the … [spirit] world to
be reincarnated” (211); emphasis added). In other
words, the woman is already pregnant when entered
by the spirit-child. This is made plainer by Read
(1918). Writing only two years after Malinowski’s
initial formulation, he states expressly that spirit-
entry is held to occur at fetal quickening. Thus what
we are dealing with is not a conception ideology at
all: rather, it is a doctrine about the generation of
the spiritual aspect of the person, and, as such, it
is comparable to baptism in Christianity, as well as
other metaphysical ideas which Aijmer (1992) has
dubbed animation.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that spirit-entry is
held to be antithetical to physical generation. Thus
Glass, drawing on more recent research in the Tro-
briands, tells us that “[t]he Trobrianders were very
guarded about articulating their knowledge of
[physiological] paternity for fear of offending ‘the
ears of the spirits’ ” (1986: ​60, emphasis added).13
Another example of spiritual animation cited by
Sahlins (2013: ​82–84) more recently pertains to the
Mae-Enga of the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
Here Meggitt (1965a: ​163) tells us that the father’s
contribution to the fetus is openly acknowledged
but what is emphasized instead is entry into the
mother’s body by the spirit of a patri-clan ancestor.
As with the Trobriands, this entry is held to occur
not at conception but a fetal quickening (Meggitt
1965a: ​163). Moreover, such ancestors are placated
in male secret/sacred ritual, held in a men’s house
from which women are barred (Meggitt 1965b: ​
13 This is a highly truncated version of a more comprehensive
study of Trobriand kinship currently in preparation. See Sha-
piro (1996) for remarkable parallels in Aboriginal Australia.
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Warren Shapiro
115). Further, it is considered offensive to the an-
cestors if a married couple copulates in the vicinity
of the men’s house and/or just after they – the an-
cestors – have been propitiated, for to do so would
“antagonize” them (115, 118). There is thus much
the same spiritual/carnal opposition as we found in
the Trobriand case.
Sahlins (2013: ​9) observes that “the Eskimo-
speaking peoples must be the world champions of
postnatal kinship”, and it is clear that recent ethno-
graphic studies of these peoples have played a large
role in making a case for the performativist posi-
tion.14 Nutall’s materials on an Inuit population in
Greenland (1992, 1994, 2000) are especially perti-
nent, partly because they supply a great deal of infor-
mation on Inuit naming practices and their connec-
tion to kin classification. Indeed, Nuttall (1994: ​133)
insists that “name beliefs [among Greenland Inuit]
raise questions … for kinship theory in general.”
Naming here is a form of ensoulment: an individ-
ual is said to be a reincarnation of a deceased rela-
tive whose name he or she is given (Nuttall 1992: ​
60, 67–69, 89; 1994: ​127). This is so much the case
that names influence the employment of kin terms:
thus, for example, a boy who is given the name of
his maternal grandfather may call his own moth-
er “daughter” (Nuttall 1992: ​68, 131). Moreover,
he may assume the kin terminological position of
someone else who has this name: he may call that
person’s wife “wife,” etc. So we have another native
extension rule, viz. Let anyone my name-giver or
name-sharer called (or calls) X be called X by me.
But this is less impressive than it seems. Here are
Nuttall’s words:
This does not mean that actual kinship, that is, kinship
based on putative biology is entirely forgotten about.
Non-biological ties … are ultimately recognized as fic-
tive when sexual relationships and inheritance are taken
into consideration. The equivalence of [kin] terminology
does not mean the equivalence of blood, so there are no
incest taboos that apply between an individual and the
actual kin of his/her name-sharer … Furthermore, inheri-
tance also recognizes the importance of genealogical con-
nection. A son … inherits … from his father. … [B]ut
(those connected through naming) have no claim … to
property (Nuttall 1992: ​68, 131; see also Nuttall 1992: ​
92; 2000: ​44, 46).
In short, among Greenland Inuit kin ties through
naming are modeled on those based on procreation.
This being so, they do not have the significance for
kinship theory that Nuttall claims.
14 E.g. Bodenhorn (2006), Fienup-Riordan (2005: ​219–221),
Nuttall (1992).
Anthropos  113.2018
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
(5)  “Elementary semantic operations are unrecog-
nized, with the result that analysis is deeply flawed
by sloppy conceptualization.” Thus, Chock (1974: ​
33), in her study of Greek-American spiritual kin-
ship, insists that “[s]piritual kinship in Greek-Amer-
ican culture is of equal symbolic status as [sic]
blood … kinship” (emphasis added). I suspect she
means that both forms of kinship are symbolic, that
“blood kinship” for these people is a “construct”
and not an unmediated reading of nature. This bit
of triteness is a regular – and uncontestable – claim
in the “new kinship studies,” 15 and it is entirely be-
side the point. The real empirical issue is wheth-
er, for Greek-Americans, one of these two forms
of kinship provides a model for the other, and it is
quite clear from the data Chock presents that “blood
kinship” does indeed serve as a model for spiritual
kinship. Here are some of the parallels she adduces
in tabular form, supplemented by my own clarifi-
cations:
physical birth spiritual rebirth
womb baptismal basin
blood (of parturition) water (of baptism)
umbilicus cut hair cut
Chock (1974: ​44)explicates by telling us that
informants … remarked on the birth symbols of baptism,
including the similarity between the shape and function
of the baptismal basin and the womb. The child is spiri-
tually reborn from its water [basin] … [B]its of [its] hair
are cut off. These symbols thus contrast with the symbols
of physical birth.
It seems fairly clear from this that her informants
modeled spiritual rebirth on physical birth, that they
likened the former to the latter. This interpretation
is supported by the way these informants depicted
godparents, with whom a relationship is established
at baptism:
People say that godparents are “like spiritual parents,”
… A godparent is a “spiritual mother” or a “spiritual fa-
ther.” Furthermore, children who have been baptized by
the same person are believed to be related as “brothers
and sisters of the oil” … This expression refers to the fact
that their godparent anointed them with olive oil at their
baptisms. They cannot marry. … In the same way, one
cannot marry the child of one’s godparent … The prohi-
bition is sometimes extended to a sibling’s godparent’s
child … [One informant] said that she had once dated
the son of her brother’s godmother and “there was a big
commotion … because it was like dating your brother”
(Chock 1974: ​38 f.).
15 See, e.g., Carsten (2000: ​10 f.), Franklin (2001), Yanagisako
and Delaney (1995: ​13–15).
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27
Note the likenings – “like a spiritual parent,” “like
dating your brother”: in each case the focus is a bio-
logical relative. Note also the use of lexical markers
(“brothers and sisters of the oil,” “spiritual moth-
er,” “spiritual father” – indicating specialization and
derivation –, and again the focus is biological rela-
tionship. Finally, note the extension of marital pro-
hibitions, almost certainly based on comparable ex­
tension of notions of relationship. The conclusion
seems to me inescapable that, if we are to use the
expression “equal symbolic status” with any rigor,
Chock’s thesis is entirely false, a distortion of the
way Greek-Americans represent the world.
Weston’s analyses of gay/lesbian families in the
San Francisco Bay Area turns Chock’s claim, so
to say, upside down, but effectively says the same
thing, and is equally mistaken. Weston (1995: ​99)
claims that gay families are “just as real” as hetero-
sexual families. The expression, like Chock’s “equal
symbolic status,” is used rhetorically, without rigor-
ous meaning, and is, therefore, beyond contestation.
The real issue is the semantic status of such a fam-
ily: as I have pointed out elsewhere (Shapiro 2010)
it is quite plainly a derivative one, and its focus is
heterosexual families (see also Peletz 1995: ​348,
364). Why else is it labelled a family? There are
other examples of semantic modeling in Weston’s
corpus; for details again see Shapiro (2010). There
is as well as solid evidence of some of her infor-
mants’ grappling with what they rightly construe to
be a heterosexual model. Here is Weston’s summary
of their position:
Why speak of lovers, friends, or even children as kin?
“We” … should develop “our” own terminology to de-
scribe “our” experiences, rather than adopting “their”
(heterosexual) language (1992: ​122 f.).
This would seem to suggest a recognition by these
informants that modeling is in status nascendi, and
that its base is heterosexual kinship: there is consid-
erable evidence for this in Weston’s corpus (again see
Shapiro 2010). It also suggests an apparently minor-
ity opinion that gay people should stake out a path of
their own, rather than imitate an established kinship
model – which, I submit, is precisely what they do.
A third and final example is provided by an up-
dating of Ward Goodenough’s Truk analysis by Mar-
shall (1976), who provides a description of various
forms of performed “siblingship” on Truk without
any recognition that all of them, as Goodenough’s
classic analysis makes plain (1951: ​99 f.), are se-
mantically derived from procreative siblingship, ei-
ther by lexical marking or some other process (but
see Marshall 1983: ​206). Here is what is apparently
Goodenough’s last statement on the m ­ atter:
28
When people enter into nonkin relationships to which
they give the rights and duties of a kin relationship, they
may analogically extend kin terms to these relationships.
Thus Americans may say, “We are like brothers.” In …
[Truk], people who are close friends will say publicly
“We are in a … [“sibling”] relationship” … In America
and … [Truk] alike, people recognize that these relation-
ships are modeled on genealogically based relationships
and that they are not “true” in this latter sense (Goode-
nough 2001: ​210; see also Scheffler 2001: ​166 f.).
Marshall, for his part, enters the comparative
arena as well, claiming that various communities
studied by other scholars “are all reported to de-
fine kinsmen primarily on the basis of performance”
(Marshall 1977: ​651). But the words “define” and
“primarily” are used without rigor, probably mean-
ing “posit” in the first instance and, in the second,
something like “has a lot of.” At any rate, I know of
no ethnographic case in which local definitions of
kinship do not assign semantic primacy to procre-
ative notions, as these are locally posited: most of this
essay is a partial demonstration of this proposition.
(6)  “Related, calling attention to the fabricated or
nonfocal nature of performative kinship is seen by
performative scholars not as a matter of semantic
analysis but as one of denigration and ethnocen-
trism, and it therefore stimulates, utterly unnec-
essarily, adversarial rhetoric.” Hence Weston’s re-
mark, noted above, about gay kinship being “just
as real” as its heterosexual analogue. Hence, too,
Schneider’s charging me with ethnocentrism for
using the rubric “pseudo-procreation” (Schneider
1989; Shapiro 1988), as if the Aboriginal Australian
rites noted by Hiatt (1971), wherein elements of the
male and female contributions to reproduction are
mimicked, were not derived from these elements,
or as if, pace supra, Greek-Americans did not mod-
el their ideas about spiritual kinship on their ideas
about physical kinship. A handy summary of this
mistaken attitude is provided by Marshall (1977: ​
644), who writes as follows: “Kinship ties that are
neither consanguineal nor affinal have been called
many things in the anthropological literature (for
example, ‘fictive,’ ‘pseudo,’ ‘ritual,’ ‘artificial’), all
of which imply that these relationships are some-
how not ‘real’.” But there is nothing wrong with
these labels insofar as they imply native modeling,
which they do, and I know of no anthropologist who
uses them in a pejorative way.
(7)  “Having thus created a non-existent gulf be-
tween procreative and performative kinship, more
recent performative scholars mistakenly marry this
distinction to a West/Rest one, and, even worse, to
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Warren Shapiro
a Manichean one, thus creating what D’Andrade
(1995) has called ‘a moral model’.” The structure
of this model is as follows:
performative kinship : procreative kinship :: ​Rest : West :: ​
Good : Evil
To which should be added
communal kinship :: individual kinship
Thus McKinnon (2005a: ​59) laments a Lost Par-
adise characterized by “an expansive understanding
of kinship,” which, she argues, survives in the Third
World of Latin American peasantry in the form of
compadrazgo, which is of course historically de-
rived from the westernmost part of Western Eu-
rope. Elsewhere (McKinnon 2005b) she instances
“classificatory” kinship terminologies, which, she
contests, provide for “a multiplicity of mothers”
(2005b: ​112), as opposed to maternal singularity in
the West; but she is utterly oblivious to the immense
evidence for lexical marking in such systems, as
well as such English expressions as godmother,
step-mother, and Mother Superior (see Shapiro
2008 for a more detailed critique). Zimmer-Ta­ma­
koshi (2001: ​192) writes of “a relatively rigid, West-
ern biological view of kinship.” And Weston (1991: ​
196) complains of “the genealogical logic of scar-
city and uniqueness.” All this is preposterous: it is
as if performative scholars have never heard of such
Western notions, whereby members of a trade union
are “brothers and sisters”; whereby all Christians,
especially those “born again” as adults, are “broth-
ers and sisters in Christ”; or as if all the evidence
cited in this essay on the centrality of procreative
kinship in the non-Western World did not exist.
(8)  Related, the very positing of such a non-exis-
tent gulf indicates that, far from representing non-
Western ethnography in ‘indigenous terms’ (Carsten
1997: ​292)  – the grandest of the grand claims of
performative scholarship –, “the more recent per-
formative scholars misrepresent this ethnography.”
I have already documented this in the present es-
say, as well as in several other places (see above).
I would add here only that, for performativists, the
time-honored tasks of serious inquiry into human
variation and the unity of humankind are abandoned
in favor of the promulgation of a moral model.
(9)  “Related, subscription to this paradigm excus-
es performativists of the scholarly responsibility of
commanding any of the kinship literature published
between Engels and Schneider, so it is hardly sur-
prising that the latter is viewed in virtually messian-
ic terms.” Thus Faubion (2001: ​5) suggests that “the
Anthropos  113.2018
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
anthropological study of kinship might be divided
into ‘pre-Schneiderian’ and ‘post-Schneiderian’ pe-
riods.” Other commentators16 are only slightly less
enthralled. Many of the key figures in the history
of kinship studies – Westermarck, Kroeber, Lowie,
Murdock, Goodenough, Lounsbury, and Scheffler,
for example – are effectively banished from the cur-
riculum of the “new kinship studies.” All the egre-
gious flaws in Schneider’s scholarship17 are ignored.
Knight (2008: ​69–70) and Weismantel (1995) repre-
sent the logical outcome of these tendencies, evok-
ing the image of a vast right-wing conspiracy bent on
hiding from the anthropological world the insights
of Marx and Engels. Some idea of how absurd this
argument is can be gleaned from Shapiro (2009a).
(10)  “Related, there is recurrent appeal in the per-
formativist literature to some of the unsustainable
claims of so-called ‘radical feminism’.” 18 In par-
ticular, Friedrich Engels’ “The Origin of the Fam-
ily, Private Property, and the State” (1972 [1884])
is accorded a venerated place in the new kinship
studies. Engels (1972: ​113) imagined that at an ear-
lier “stage” in human “prehistory” “the position of
women [was] not only free, but honorable,” and
he linked this high ranking with the absence of the
nuclear family  – the bête noir of “radical” femi-
nism – and “mother right.” So – as if to instantiate
his words – Carsten emphasizes that her Malays live
in houses composed partly of matrilineally-related
women who, she claims, are “central to the politi-
cal process” (1997: ​18). She ignores completely the
compartmentalization of these houses into nuclear
families (Shapiro 2011b: ​143 f.). As for the “politi-
cally central” claim, it is gainsaid by a mass of data,
including one of the photographs in her magnum
opus: its caption is “Men vote at a village meeting”
(Carsten 1997: ​141), and, accurately enough, it con-
tains not a single woman.
16 E.g., Bamford and Leach (2009: ​9), Brettell (2001: ​48), Ter-
rell and Modell (1994: ​158).
17 E.g., Kuper (1999: ​133 ff.), Scheffler (1976), Wallace (1969).
18 The temporal and geographical proximity to Morgan – he
lived in Rochester, New York – is remarkable, especially in
the light of Morgan’s incipient feminism. Thus he writes as
follows: “It … remains an enigma that a race, with endow-
ments great enough to impress their mental life upon the
world, should have remained essentially barbarian in their
treatment of the female sex … Women were not treated with
cruelty … within the range of the privileges allowed them;
but their education was superficial … and their inferiority
was inculcated as a principle … The wife was not the com-
panion and the equal of her husband … The wife is neces-
sarily the equal of her husband in dignity, in personal rights
and in social position” (Morgan 1877: ​474 f.).
But I am unaware of any scholarly treatment of the mat-
ter.
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29
Her misanalysis is by no means unique. Thus
an alleged “new anthropological view” of the near-
universality of the nuclear family by Collier and
her associates (Collier et al. 1992) maintains that
the Mundurucú of central Brazil, studied by Robert
and Yolanda Murphy (Murphy 1960; Murphy and
­Murphy 1974), lack the nuclear family because vil-
lage men reside largely in a special “men’s house,”
with women resident, apparently collectively, in
separate dwellings. This recalls the Mae-Enga case,
noted above. But this “collective” residence is de-
cidedly compromised by several factors. First, a man
regularly visits the women’s quarters, and when he
does he associates exclusively with his own wife and
their dependent children, providing them with meat
from the hunt and fish from the catch. Second, he
leaves his personal possessions near his wife’s ham-
mock, not in the men’s house. Third, when ill, he
leaves the men’s house and resides with his wife, so
that she can minister to him. Finally, there are vari-
ous symbolic expressions of the unity of husband
and wife, along with their common children. So, as
with Carsten’s Malays, the all-female collective is
an illusion. As for the men’s house it-self, it is not
just a place where men sleep and spend many of
their waking hours. It is a locale from which women
are absolutely barred, on penalty of gang rape, and
within it are held rituals of a very high order of mi-
sogyny. That the traditional Mundurucú should be
held up as exemplifying a feminist paradise seems
therefore nothing short of delusional.
Even more revealing is what has happened to
those Mundurucú who have become involved in the
Brazilian rubber trade. This involvement has led to
the disappearance of both the men’s house and the
allegedly collective female residences, and it has
been instigated by the women, who plainly prefer
to reside permanently with their husbands and chil-
dren. The men, for their part, tend to wax nostalgic
about the former regime. So the suggestion, made
by Robert Murphy (1959) himself, is that the rela-
tively isolated nuclear family encourages the dimin-
ishment of sexism, and that a regime of “extended
family” households is what encourages the mistreat-
ment of women (Shapiro 2011a).
All this, of course, is directly contrary to Engels.
These two cases show with remarkable clarity that
the conjoined fantasies of the all-female collective
and the absence of the nuclear family readily trump
anything resembling accurate rendering or reading
of ethnographic materials. What’s more, Murphy
seems to have been on the right track. To see this,
all one has to do is to consider where – and under
what conditions – the modern feminist movement
emerged. The place, apparently by common agree-
30
ment, was Seneca Falls, New York:19 It was not
Moscow or Beijing or a village in Amazonia or the
Papua New Guinea Highlands. It occurred more or
less simultaneously with the European political rev-
olutions of 1848 – more than three decades before
Engels wrote, nearly seven decades before L ­ enin
replaced the tyranny of the czar with the Tyranny
of the People, but only fifteen years before the ab-
olition of slavery in the United States. Among its
more or less immediate predecessors were chang-
es in British law which allowed women to inherit
their fathers’ private property (Tobias 1997: ​15–17).
All this seems lost on “radical” feminists – includ-
ing their representatives in the new kinship stud-
ies – who, like other utopian intellectuals, want the
world made perfect the day before yesterday.
An especially outrageous example of radical
feminism’s influence on the “new kinship studies” is
provided by one of the most regularly cited articles
in the performativist corpus, i.e., Weismantel’s es-
say on adoption in a village in the Ecuadorian high-
lands, which claims to find a “masculinist bias” in
pre-Schneiderian kinship studies (1995: ​692). She
expands, in what I regard as the single most irre-
sponsible statement in all the performative literature:
[O]ne aspect of this masculinist heritage that has re-
mained largely unexamined is the emphasis upon sexual
intercourse as the single moment in which paternity be-
comes embodied. The authors of classical kinship thereby
universalized a heterosexual masculine perspective, de-
rived from traditional bourgeois life, in which men de-
fined their role in the family primarily in terms of sex-
ual access to the wife and a distanced authority over the
children. Extended nonsexual physical contact, especially
with children …, or nurturance for other family members,
was defined as feminine and demeaning … (Weismantel
1995: ​697).
Weismantel (1995) claims that all this “is alien
to the experience” of the people among whom she
worked. Let me suggest that it is also alien to the
experience of a very large number of Westerners,
“bourgeois” or otherwise. I cannot pronounce upon
the numbers involved, just as Weismantel has no
idea as to how many “bourgeois” families fit her
stereotype: apparently, she sees no need to cite any
historical or ethnographic research on such fami-
lies. Her article consists almost entirely of actual
instances showing that people get attached to those
who adopt them in early childhood, which is hardly
news, and recurrent bashes at “bourgeois” under-
standings of sociality. She claims that, in the com-
19 “I cannot bring myself to call these women ‘radical’ femi-
nists, as they are usually labeled, because I do not believe
they go to the root of anything” (Patai 1998: ​136).
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Warren Shapiro
munity in which she carried out fieldwork, “there is
absolutely no privileging of the relationship a child
has with the genitor and genitrix over others who
are called parents” (1995: ​691), and that “[o]ften …
the reverse is the case …” (691), but we are given
no idea as to how often, and under what conditions,
and there is absolutely nothing on kin classification.
In any case, her book on this community (Weis­
man­tel 1988) is not at all consistent with these
claims. Here she notes that “[t]he nuclear family is
the conceptual basis for the … household” (169),
and that there are “extended and fictive kin” (171).
Moreover, she tells us that “[a] man or woman re-
fers to his/her mother-in-law or father-in-law as
‘mother’ and ‘father’,” respectively, but the recipro-
cal terms are not the unmarked “child” terms, or any
lexically marked version thereof. Rather, they are
purely affinal terms (171): hence it is not true that all
others called by parental terms are undistinguished
from actual parents. These affinal “parents” are said
to be “not really kin” (171), nor are they behavior-
ally like real parents; on the contrary, they are far
less nurturant than exploitative: Weismantel (1988: ​
171–174) spends some time instancing examples of
callous treatment of sons- and daughters-in-law by
the parents of their spouses. Moreover, there is con-
siderable stigma – very “bourgeois,” this – attached
to producing a child out of wedlock, even if the cou-
ple marries before the child is born (170).
(11)  “Related, performative scholars claim, quite
mistakenly, that certain ethnographic findings dem-
onstrate the unimportance of procreative kinship in
at least some non-Western communities.” The claim
by Storrie (2003: ​408) that the Hoti of the Venezue-
lan rainforests “do … not recognize any idea of ge-
nealogical connection between persons” is surely
the most astonishing example; but it is gainsaid by
his employment of native theories of parent/child
linkage in questioning informants (410 f.); and then
by his list of Hoti kin terms, including the informa-
tion that “parent” terms, when used in the possessive
form, isolate the “biological father” and “the biolog-
ical mother” (412). Also pertinent is the proposition,
fairly widely found in the performative literature,
that, just as performative ties can be maximized in
practice, so procreative ones can be minimized or
neglected altogether. This is, supposedly, especial-
ly true with regard to adoption, wherein the seeking
out of birthparents by adoptees is put down by per-
formativists to a Western obsession with biological
connection.20 But as I have shown elsewhere (Sha-
20 E.g. Bowie (2004), Terrell and Modell (1994), Weismantel
(1995).
Anthropos  113.2018
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
piro 2015a), adoption in most of the world involves
lexical marking  – i.e., it is generally regarded as
a secondary form of kinship, birthparents are fre-
quently reluctant to give up their children and virtu-
ally always retain ties to them, including the ability
to reclaim them (see also Silk 1987).
The flexibility of non-Western kinship is a recur-
rent theme in the “new kinship” literature.21 There
is indeed such flexibility, in both parts of the world
in fact, but it has its limits: relatively distant procre-
ative ties can be ignored or even cut, but usually not
close ones.22 The plain fact is that most human be-
ings do not just forget about their parents, siblings,
or children.
(12) “Performative scholars subscribe to a ‘cul-
ture’/​‘biology’ dichotomy which is utterly obsolete.”
Thus, Sahlins (1976: ​22), in his supposed critique
of sociobiology, distinguishes between “a naturally
given set of ‘blood relationships’ ” and “a culturally
variable system of meaningful categories”; and in
his recent (and also supposed) synthesis on kinship
(2013), he declares flatly that human kinship is “cul-
ture,” not “biology” – as if these expressions point-
ed to anything more than an Everyperson’s innate/
learned dichotomy, abandoned in the hard sciences
for at least four decades (Lehrman 1970). McKin-
non (2005b: ​127) claims that evolutionary psychol-
ogy insists upon “universal forms of behavior,” in
apparent ignorance of the reliance on probability
calculi in virtually all research in this field. And she
adds (117), in fine “deconstructionist” style, that it
exemplifies a “restrictive understanding of kinship
… that is a reflection of Western upper-class con-
cerns.” She fails utterly to see its indebtedness to the
idea on brain modularity of Noam Chomsky, not a
man generally associated with “reactionary” politi-
cal views. Cassidy (2009) marries this antiquated
view of “biology” with the pre-Schneiderian con-
cern with “the genealogical model,” about which
she says the following:
It reduces individuals and events to the playing out of …
inevitable properties … It presents the contingent as nec-
essary, and in doing so provides evidence supporting the
most conservative of interpretations of the present. Much
of its utility depends on an ability to separate the mod-
el from society, to allocate it a place within “nature” …
(2009: ​24  f.).
No one is spared the all-seeing eye of “decon-
struction”: even Darwin is exposed as An Enemy of
21 E.g., Bodenhorn (2000), Carsten (1995), DeMallie (1994).
22 See, e.g., Beattie (1971), Marshall (1977: ​659), Weston
(1991: ​43–75).
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31
the People and gets his comeuppance in the volume
in which Cassidy’s essay appears.23 More, the fol-
lowing excerpt from one of Marx’s letters to Engels
appears at least twice in the performativist litera-
ture (Sahlins 1976: ​101 f.; Yanagisako and Delaney
1995: ​5): “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes
among beasts and plants his English society with
its division of labour [read, diversification], com-
petition, opening of new markets [niches], ‘inven-
tions’ [variations], and the Malthusian ‘struggle for
existence.’ ”
So Darwin’s thought occurred in a particular so-
cial and economic environment. It’s unclear how
this distinguishes him from anyone else, including
Marx and the new kinship scholars. Thus, Wilson
(2016: ​573) turns the tables on the performativists
by arguing that
a conception of kinship indeed has been projected from
“the West” to “the Rest” in [performative] kinship present
… This conception of kinship reflects the shift in kinship
structures in the West in the 1960s and 1970s … [This
shift was exemplified by] working mothers, the spread of
contraception, skyrocketing divorce rates, Brady Bunch
families, communal living and free love [and] sexual lib-
eration … Combined with developing technologies of re-
production, those in the West had new ways to live …
That [new] conception of kinship was then projected
onto societies subject to past colonial and imperial in-
fluence … .
But of course the purpose of the quotation from
Marx is not illumination but denigration. Let me
suggest instead that Darwin is a rather bad choice
for an argument that people (except, of course, “de-
constructionists”) are just parrots for an established
regime, as well as, pace Cassidy, the contention that
his sense of genealogy “reduces individuals and
events to the playing out of inevitable properties.”
Performativists need to recall the title of Dar-
win’s most famous book “On the Origin of Spe-
cies by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preser-
vation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”
(1859), as well as the importance of differential re-
production and speciation in his overall theory. This
is the very opposite of Cassidy’s implication that
his model of evolution “presents the contingent as
necessary.” Such a preformationist model (Rich-
ards 1992) is the one proffered by Morgan and other
“classical evolutionists” (Carneiro 2003). Although
Darwin could never fully rid himself of it,24 this is
not why he is generally considered the greatest fig-
23 Bamford and Leach (2009: ​6), Cunningham (2009: ​112), In-
gold (2009: ​208).
24 E.g., Bowler (2009: ​163 f.), Gruber (1981: ​181–184, 197–
199), Richards (1988: ​137).
32
ure in the history of biology. The radical distinction
between the two senses of “evolution” is widely ap-
preciated by historians of social theory.25 Moreover,
far from echoing his Zeit­geist, Darwin was quite
aware that his formulations, especially on the muta-
bility of species, would offend extant religious sen-
sibilities (Gruber 1981: ​202–204, 209–213). Indeed,
as Bowler (1986: ​41) has argued, his “making nat-
ural development an essentially haphazard … pro-
cess” “challenged the most fundamental values of
the Victorian era.”
The shoe, really, is mostly on the other foot: it
is performativists like Sahlins and McKinnon who
subscribe to a performationist model (to which they
add certain Manichean quality). For them “culture”
is imagined as replacing “biology,” and as antitheti-
cal to it. At the same time, “biology” is construed as
something apart from “learning” or “socialization,”
somehow “inherent” in individuals, and “its” con-
sequences, unless countered by “culture,” are seen
as inevitable. This has absolutely nothing to do with
current conceptualizations of the organism/envi-
ronment interface in biology:26 it is, again, nothing
more than an Everyperson’s ideology.
With this antediluvian view of biology, perfor-
mativists claim that those who stress procreative
kinship ideas are advocates of a “reductive” (or “es-
sentialist” or “biologized”) view of the human situ-
ation, views which, we are to believe, held in uni-
son by the Western scientific “establishment” and
Western folk theory.27 It is, of course, nothing if not
voguish these days to “deconstruct” various scien-
tific claims, or even the whole scientific/medical en-
terprise (Gross and Levitt 1994). Such “deconstruc-
tion,” it bears noting, should not be confused with
earnest history-of-ideas scholarship, which serious-
ly examines theories in their social and intellectual
contexts. Its only purposes, as noted, are denigration
and rhetorical one-upmanship, and it carries the im-
plication that those who “deconstruct” are part of
an elite class who have somehow managed to sur-
pass the biographical and social constraints that en-
trap the rest of us and see into Ultimate Reality. A
corollary of all this, widely maintained, as we have
seen, in the performativist literature, is that biolo-
gy too is “culture,” implying in turn that there is no
reason to grant it privileged status. Thus, not only
can the old kinship studies be ignored, “reductive”
as they are, but so too can a very considerable lit-
25 E.g., Carneiro (2003: ​171 f.), Nisbet (1969: ​159–208), Rich-
ards (1992).
26 E.g., Barkow (2006), Oyama (1985), Pinker (2002: ​100–
102).
27 E.g., Franklin (2001), Franklin and McKinnon (2001), Mc­
Kinnon (2005a, 2005b).
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Warren Shapiro
erature on native science apart from the reproduc-
tive process.28 Non-Western people are viewed as
corseted in “cultures,” devoid of any scientific tra-
ditions of their own, and as having no interest in
Western science; in truth, this is not very far from
the worst Victorian and pre-Victorian images of
“savagery.” All knowledge, after all, is held to be
“constructed” – except the knowledge of “decon-
structionists,” which, to them at least, is quite real.
Consider the sheer pretentiousness of the following
remarks:
[T]he presumption of the structuring importance of the
“facts of life” as they are defined by Western biological
science [has] enormous theoretical consequences … The
production of sexual differences, the maintenance of het-
erosexuality, the operation of an a priori domain of “nat-
ural fact,” [and] the presumption of a reproductive telos
at the base of social organization all … evade critical rec­
ognition … as a result of being so taken-for-granted [that]
they remain invisible. … [T]hese features … of a centu-
ry of anthropological debate [on kinship] can be directly
traced to the post-Darwinian worldview of Euro-Ameri-
can anthropology (Franklin 1997: ​49, emphasis in origi-
nal).
(13) “Performative scholars participate in what
might be dubbed as ‘feudal’ academic community,
entirely at odds with the universalistic values that
academic institutions are supposed to live by.” They
repeatedly cite one another – and in often lauda-
tory terms, as if each one had made a serious con-
tribution to knowledge, one which is beyond ques-
tion. Thus, Carsten (2013: ​245), self-involved in the
sort of literary flourish common among performa-
tivists, judges Sahlins’ recent synthesis (2013) to be
“wonderful” and “intuitively graspable – not as an
analytic abstraction, as many definitions of kinship
seem to be, but in a way that palpably makes sense
of a whole range of human experience.” Schnei-
der’s analysis of Yapese kinship is described as
“brilliant” (Terrell and Modell 1994: ​158), despite
the fact that it has been called into question by sev-
eral scholars.29 On the other side of the emotion-
al spectrum, Weismantel’s vitriolic contribution, as
I have already noted, is regularly cited, but hers is
only the starkest expression of an overall hostili-
ty to contrary views. The most common response
to such views is to ignore them. Scholarly debate,
when it occurs, is almost invariably ad hominem, ei-
ther blatantly or by assigning to adversaries unfash-
ionable political views (“arch-conservative”), social
28 E.g., Brown (1984), Goodenough (1996), Sanga and Ortalli
(2004).
29 E.g., Labby (1976), Lingenfelter (1975), Shimizu (1991).
Anthropos  113.2018
Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
class positions (“bourgeois”), or gender attributes
(“masculinist”).30
(14) “Since ‘biology’ implies inevitability, ‘cul-
ture,’ its Manichean counterpart, implies untram-
meled freedom.” In practice this amounts to the un-
trammeled freedom of alleged authorities to dictate
people’s lives. This utterly disrespects the complex-
ity of the human nervous system as well as human
creativity and initiative (see my last epigraph), in-
cluding the ability to question authority. As noted,
performative scholars see themselves as part of a
larger “deconstructionist” project, allegedly collab-
orating with other “revolutionary” movements to
free the world from the constraints of capitalism,
the nuclear family, and the erotic and power lusts of
White heterosexual males. But here, as elsewhere,
their “ethnography” is deeply flawed: by my lights
the greatest power on a university campus these
days lies with the local Sexual Harassment Office,
seconded by the political intolerance of both fac-
ulty and students, programs peddling “diversity”
(but insisting on conformity), and the almost com-
plete “adaptability” of administrators (since the late
1960s, in fact) to extant fads.
(15)  Last, and worst of all, “all this bodes badly for
the future of kinship studies – indeed, for education
at large, which in any case has been on a downhill
course since the late 1960s.” This is because perfor-
mative scholars have come to constitute part of an
Establishment on university campuses. Even with
the best of intentions, university administrators, not
being (except in rare cases) kinship experts, will be-
lieve that those who claim to be so actually are – all
the more so when they are willing – more than will-
ing to marry their “expertise” with current trends
in social thought, particularly “postmodernism” and
“radical” feminism, which appeal to students and
potential students and, thus, help such institutions to
meet their bottom lines. Much the same can be said
for funding agencies, whose grants depend largely
on “expert” advice. In this way, such an Establish-
ment becomes self-perpetuating: it is looked to for
advice of this sort, including what to do about hir-
ing, promotion, and student admission. Finally, and
also self-perpetuating, a professoriate of under-edu-
30 The one exception that comes to mind is a debate between
Linda Watts and myself (subsequent to Shapiro 2009a),
which, though heated, was nonetheless scholarly, if I may
say so. It is, I think, significant that Watts is one of the few
performative scholars who takes systems of kin classification
seriously, and who is familiar with the older literature. The
“arch-conservative” charge was leveled against me by Sah-
lins (2012).
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33
cated pseudo-scholars will have in their classrooms
far more devotees than students with a right to ques-
tion; the latter, if tolerated at all, will likely be sent
for “sensitivity training.”
Concluding Remarks
In one of the very many self-congratulatory “synthe-
ses” attempted by performative scholars, Schweit-
zer (2000: ​214) writes of “the ‘outdated’ nature of
pre-Schneiderian kinship studies.” But such a trium-
phant tone, as I believe I have shown, is warranted
only if one conflates scholarly progress with intel-
lectual sloppiness and academic faddishness. The
performativists’ position seems reasonable to some,
because they ignore systems of kin classification or
have sophomoric views of their semantic structure,
and because they have no idea of the overwhelm-
ing evidence for the extensionist position in the ear-
ly literature and beyond – indeed, even in much of
their own published work. The “cutting edge” they
have generated aligns what was once anthropolo-
gy’s gem with Afrocentrism, Goddess and matriar-
chy theory, the idea that gender is merely a “social
construct,” and other hokums that have been devel-
oping since the 1960s.
All this is bad enough, but in addition, performa-
tivists have married it to utterly discredited collec-
tivist theories of human sociality and the unsustain-
able West/Rest dichotomy that drives those theories.
They are, I think it fair to say, part of a Brave New
Academic World in which professorships – even the
status of “public intellectual” – are granted, based
less on scholarly achievement and more on preten-
tious writing, faux commitment to hopelessly failed
social and political ideas, gender (female, transgen-
der), sexual preference (gay/lesbian), racial catego-
ry (non-White, in the process of becoming, at least
in the United States, non-Asian as well), misrepre-
senting The Other (as Primitive and/or Matriarchal
Communists), and, of course, the ability to “decon-
struct” what one knows next to nothing about.
Finally, it seems to me long overdue that we
abandon the absurd argument that procreative kin-
ship is a Western perversion of the “essentially”
collective nature of human sociality, allegedly to
be found in one part or another of the non-Western
world. Focality and extension in kin classification
are not fabrications of a vast right-wing conspira-
cy bent on hiding from us the “insights” of Fried-
rich Engels, or David Schneider, or Marshall Sah-
lins: they have been in the ethnographic record for
over a century. We find them whenever one of our
informants tells us that his or her genetrix is the
34
“true” member of her kin class, and whenever he or
she notes that he/she calls a particular man “father”
because his/her “true” father called him “brother.”
This being so, the suggestion is that the nuclear
family is something to which human beings are in-
clined by their species heritage and not the dispos-
able product of a particular “stage of society” or a
particular economic regime or “arch-conservative”
social views. The number of exceptions to its near-
universality in the ethnographic record on the Third
World can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
More urgently, there are exceptions all around us
in the shape of “alternative family forms.” But even
this expression suggests modeling, and it should be
clear by now what this model is. The real achieve-
ment of the performativists, though I doubt that they
would ever admit it, is not that they show that the
nuclear family is absent or unimportant in some
communities but, quite to the contrary, that it is so
important nearly everywhere that people model oth-
er social ties on it.
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